On implementational variations in static analysis tools

Static analysis tools are widely used in practice due to their ability to detect defects early in the software development life-cycle and that too while proving absence of defects of certain patterns. There exists a large number of such tools, and they are found to be varying depending on several tool characteristics like analysis techniques, programming languages supported, verification checks performed, scalability, and performance. Many studies about these tools and their variations, have been performed to improve the analysis results or figure out a better tool amongst a set of available static analysis tools. It is our observation that, in these studies only the aforementioned tool characteristics are considered and compared, and other implementational variations are usually ignored. In this paper, we study the implementational variations occurring among the static analysis tools, and experimentally demonstrate their impact on the tool characteristics and other analysis related attributes. The aim of this paper is twofold - a) to provide the studied implementational variations as choices, along with their pros and cons, to the designers or developers of static analysis tools, and b) to provide an educating material to the tool users so that the analysis results are better understood.